A significant proportion of people with learning difficulties have social problems, which are often considered to be the product of school failure. However, a number of studies have suggested that these social skill problems may relate to the inability to decode subtle visual cues of body language and facial expression. The majority of studies of facial expression, however, have viewed learning disability as a unitary condition, without taking account of specific sub‐types which may have more difficulty in processing visual cues, especially for facial emotion. This study investigated children aged 8 to 12 years who were divided into three learning disability sub‐groups: 1) a visual‐perceptual sub‐type called Irlen Syndrome (n=41); 2) a group with learning disabilities, but no indications of Irlen Syndrome (n=30); and 3) a normally achieving control group (n=31). The Irlen Syndrome sub‐group had significantly lower scores for interpreting emotion from facial expression than the two other groups. The learning disabled non‐lrlen sub‐group also had significantly lower scores than the control group, but with much smaller levels of significance than those between the Irlen and control groups.

This paper reports on the use of a cross‐age tutoring program designed to improve the literacy skills of a profoundly deaf girl. In a novel approach to such programs, both tutor and tutee participants were profoundly deaf and used Auslan as their common mode of communication. The results of the program indicate that cross‐age peer tutoring has potential as an effective strategy for improving the literacy achievements of deaf children like the tutee participant. Analysis of the videotaped interactions between tutor and tutee over the course of the program provided unique insights into the nature of English literacy learning by profoundly deaf students. These insights point to a role for strategies like cross‐age tutoring where the particular experience of. deafness can be used to promote more effective interpretation and understanding of English for profoundly deaf literacy learners.